US TARIFFS UPDATE | August 2025 | No impact expected on your Presto orders | Read full details
Britten & Dowland - Lute Songs
Mark Padmore (tenor) & Elizabeth Kenny (lute), guitar solo by Craig Ogden
Awards:
-
Building a Library, January 2013, Top recommendation - Dowland Songs
Padmore provides context by singing Dowland's original song before Craig Ogden steals in, alert to the Nocturnal's every nuance, and with a palette of colours both caressing and disquieting....
Britten & Dowland - Lute Songs
Mark Padmore (tenor) & Elizabeth Kenny (lute), guitar solo by Craig Ogden
Purchase product
Awards:
-
Building a Library, January 2013, Top recommendation - Dowland Songs
Padmore provides context by singing Dowland's original song before Craig Ogden steals in, alert to the Nocturnal's every nuance, and with a palette of colours both caressing and disquieting....
About
Mark Padmore is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest tenors working today, celebrated in the opera house, the concert hall and as a peerless recording artist. He is admiredamong other thingsfor his extraordinary diction and whispering chamber-like intimacy [his] joy in conveying the emotional core of each situation (Gramophone) and it is these facets of his performancetogether with the exquisite musicianship of Elizabeth Kennywhich make this disc of Dowland songs such a delight. The little world of each song is sensitively explored and beautifully expressed. Elizabeth Kenny writes in her scholarly booklet notes that over the years many great singers have made Dowlands voice their own, and this is one of our starting points for this disc. Padmore and Kenny have used some perhaps less familiar manuscripts to perform a number of these songs and the result is fascinating. Brittens Nocturnal after John Dowland, written for Julian Bream in 1963, is an extended exploration of the tensions and nightmares behind the song Come, heavy Sleep, and receives a darkly brilliant performance here by Craig Ogdon.
Contents and tracklist
Awards and reviews
February 2008
Padmore provides context by singing Dowland's original song before Craig Ogden steals in, alert to the Nocturnal's every nuance, and with a palette of colours both caressing and disquieting. Completing the frame, 'Flow my Tears' is beautifully inflected, though finer still is 'In Darkness let me Dwell' where in the final bars Padmore's enrapt engagement seems to conjure up the very chill of death.
... extraordinary diction and whispering chamber-like intimacy … [Mark Padmore] joy in conveying the emotional core of each situation
Janurary 2008
Mark Padmore again shows why he is one of today's finest tenors. The quicker songs, like "Away with these self-loving lads", gain in clarity from a semi-declamatory approach, while the slower are eerily viol-like.
Early Music Today
A simply brilliant disc. I can’t praise it enough. A bronze Liz Kenny should be on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square, in my opinion
The Independent on Sunday
Since Emma Kirkby’s first recording in the late-1970s, we have known what to expect from Dowland’s lute songs. Some fine discs have followed, but not until Mark Padmore and Elizabeth Kenny’s new release has there been one as radical in
its potential impact on our understanding of the music. With tonal purity intact, voice and lute add subtle decoration, rhythmic fluidity, drama and rich poetic sensibility to these songs
